Rumor Alert: New Art of Animation Resort to be a Convention Hotel

[WaltD4Me]

Rumor flying around that Art of Animation is going to be a convention resort. Apparently Disney Meetings tweeted this.....

"Disney's Art of Animation Resort opening 2012 at WDW will have more than 700,000 square feet of meeting & event space."


Where in the heck would they fit it?

 

[EricMat]

Hum, VERY interesting !

 

[mikelan6]

That might explain the indoor corridors for the buildings.

 

[ADP]

I'm going to guess it will be a separate building. There's a lot of open land around the exisitg unfinished buildings.

 

[Cheshire Figment]

That is an impossible number. Coronado Springs has about 120,000 sf. The Javits Center in New York City is 760,000 sf. The Contemporary has 92,000 sf.

And since they are working on the hotel, if they were to be building a convention center at that Resort they would already be announcing it in the trade puublications and taking advance reservations. Normally organizations that need that much space tend to do their bookings at least three years out.

 

[DCTooTall]

Maybe it was meant to be a cumulative number of all the WDW event and meeting space available and not just at the 1 resort?

 

[WaltD4Me]

That is an impossible number. Coronado Springs has about 120,000 sf. The Javits Center in New York City is 760,000 sf. The Contemporary has 92,000 sf.

And since they are working on the hotel, if they were to be building a convention center at that Resort they would already be announcing it in the trade puublications and taking advance reservations. Normally organizations that need that much space tend to do their bookings at least three years out.

I agree, I thought the number was huge too, but apparently that was the tweet. Maybe they were just kidding.

 

[doconeill]

They already announced the room numbers, which make sense if all of the buildings are in fact guest rooms. So unless they are scaling back the rooms (doubtful), retrofitting the main hall as a convention center (also unlikely), or it isn't going to be directly part of the resort but across Victory Way or the Access Road.

P.S. I'm looking at @DisneyMeetings right now, and they did not tweet anything about it being a convention resort. Here is the tweet:

Disney’s Art of Animation Resort will open in 2012 as the 26th hotel property at the Walt Disney World Resort.

I do however see several re-tweets about it yesterday, so it looks like they deleted it.
Probably because it was completely false, or at least that number was completely wrong...

 

[Joshua_me]

Well, that would certainly cheese off The Dolphin, syphoning away a lot of it's convention business....

But, it seems unlikely. Conventioneers demand high quality restaurants and bars on site, (they complain about the lack of them at CS all the time, and they're often not too thrilled with the CR, either...)

Nah. I think maybe they might be planning large rooms for, perhaps, more "bargain minded" wedding receptions and the like. I can see that...

Disney weddings are big business as you all know, and this hotel could offer a more economically priced alternative.

 

[FireDancer]

Maybe it was supposed to be 70,000 and they fat fingered it? I could see the need for a value level convention resort since there currently isn't one and I imagine Disney wouldn't mind taking some business back from the Swan/Dolphin.

Much like the new country at World Showcase I'll believe it when I see it.